Galileo for VMware: Deep Performance Insights and Data Trending

Using Galileo for VMware, VMware administrators can now access issues using both predefined and customizable alerts. These alerts—based on the best practices of top VMware experts—cover such important environmental factors as CPU utilization, CPU ready time, memory ballooning/swapping, and disk latency. In the Galileo alerting dashboard, users can view details on CPU, Memory, Network, Storage, and Configuration—as well as how many VMware clusters are affected under each alert. This means that users can locate issues in just seconds when less advanced methods still require hours.

The Alerting Function view lists different components and potential issues.

The traditional methods for system performance monitoring in VMware typically take hours. For example, creating the charts required to examine both trending data and vSphere performance require the advanced charting features in vCenter as well as ESXTOP. In contrast, the alerting features offered by Galileo can pinpoint any performance issue—such as an issue with Storage Host Disk Write Latency—in just seconds.

Detailed view of the alert for Storage Disk Total Write Latency.

In this example, users start with the Storage Card showing Host Disk Write Latency. In the Storage section, they can see details on VMFS datastores. If they see a large spike in Disk Write Latency at a specific time, they could ask: “What happened at that time that caused Host Disk Write Latency for this disk to spike?”

The core chart for Disk Total Write Latency with a Last Month time range.

The next step is to determine if this issue is new or ongoing. Clicking the chart will allow us to access a popup. From there, we can examine dates ranges that would show when the problem started. The user can then isolate responsible environmental changes n this timeframe.